The sour plum soup you drink may be a "blend"

Source: Tonight's Newspaper

The heat is unbearable, many citizens have the habit of drinking sour plum soup to dispel the heat, and Tianjin's large and small catering establishments also sell sour plum soup as the main best-selling drink. However, the reporter learned in the interview that some sour plum soups on the market are not what everyone thinks is cooked by the store, but is made of additives.

In a hot pot restaurant located in Hexi District, sour plum soup has become a must-have at almost every table, the reporter asked the waiter how to make sour plum soup, the other party said that it was made in the store, and when he continued to ask how to do it, the waiter said: "You can rest assured, the ingredients are used", but there is no positive answer to whether it is boiled by yourself. In another fashion tea shop not far from here, sour plum soup is also a hot product in the store. When the reporter asked the clerk how the sour plum soup was made, the answer was the same: "Surely no problem." ”

So, is the sour plum soup in the dining place commonly believed to be boiled with ume and hawthorn? "I think the sour plum soup should be the kind of roadside drink when I was a child, cooked with a bag of ingredients and then iced." Ms. Yan, a citizen, told reporters in an interview. People in the Tianjin catering industry said that the sour plum soup sold in some stores is not boiled with raw materials such as wumei, because it is too time-consuming and manpower, and it is replaced by sour plum crystals. This is not only convenient, you can drink it in one flush, and the price is also very cheap.

The reporter searched the e-commerce platform commonly used by the public and saw that many restaurants used sour plum crystals and commercial sour plum paste were being sold online, and the sales volume was very high. So calculated, the price of "synthetic" sour plum soup with such a product is very "cost-effective", such as a sour plum paste packaging, marked with the words "low commercial cost, high profit", and a bucket of sour plum paste can be mixed with 45 liters of water to make 50 kg of sour plum soup. According to the calculation of 250 ml per cup, it can be brewed into about 200 cups of sour plum soup. Converted down to this 78 yuan a barrel of sour plum paste, the cost of each cup of sour plum soup made, the cost of sour plum paste is 0.39 yuan. Another sour plum crystal a box of 15 bags priced at 158 yuan, each bag content of 680 grams, 150 grams of acid plum crystal can be mixed with 1.2L of water, about can be made into a hotel in a za. Calculated, generally selling 38 yuan a piece of sour plum soup, the production cost (not counting water) is about 3.5 yuan.

In addition, this "blended" version of sour plum soup is not what everyone thinks of as "additive-free", but contains a variety of additives. For example, the ingredient list of a sour plum paste sold online contains fructose syrup, white sugar, water, ume, hawthorn, licorice, edible salt, food flavor, citric acid, DL-malic acid, caramel color, sodium citrate, monosodium glutamate, acesulfame potassium, aspartame, potassium sorbate. From these ingredients, it can be seen that in addition to ingredients such as ume, there are also flavors, four kinds of sugars, as well as pigments and preservatives.

People in the catering industry in Tianjin believe that the sour plum soup sold in catering establishments is not made by the merchants themselves with simple wumei and so on, and should be made clear to consumers, rather than selling with vague concepts.

Reporter Zheng Yan